


Thursday

by LottieHarvey



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Humor, Eventual Romance, F/M, Gen, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, Inappropriate Humor, Original Character(s), Other, POV First Person, Tags May Change, Thursday Tropes, What Have I Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:35:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3681717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LottieHarvey/pseuds/LottieHarvey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agnes Williams is a giant, glaring mess.  So when she's transported through a giant, glaring, green thing to Inquisition-era Thedas, plus placed in the body of the now-dead Inquisitor, mind-blowing action, adventure, and romance should ensue.  And they do, sort of.  Sadly, she's still a mess.  Also, for some reason her boss followed her there.  Screw you Ted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thursday

I’m going to start with a very special day in my life: Thursday. One of the special things that happened on this particular Thursday involved my waking up with a terrible hangover. I opened my eyes on the couch in a t-shirt and panties, and it was brilliantly sunny out. There’d been no sunnier fucking day in existence. I saw the sun and threw up immediately. That was to be the first of a couple times I threw up over the course of the day. 

Oh, and that's actually not the entire story of my day. I wasn't intending to give you the full rundown on my hangover, there really was something special that happened. It happened, though, while I was at an especially low point; just snuck up on me like it was the lion and I was the wounded gazelle who drank too much. What happened is that I got whisked away to another world and deposited in the body of a dead woman. Her name was Evelyn Trevelyan and she was known as the Herald of Andraste. My name is Agnes Williams and no one knows who the hell I am. 

But back to Thursday morning, now, because at the time, I had things to take care of. 

“Oh,” I tried to moan after seeing the sun and vomiting, but I couldn’t even manage that. My voice instead came out as a dehydrated little whimper. My throat was so dry I was frightened I’d cough up blood. I launched myself through the living room into the kitchen, where I drank several glasses of water. I work, something I’d decided to conveniently forget about the night previous. 

I checked my phone for time, found that it was 12:30, and made a fake-gagging sound that turned quickly into a real gag because those two glasses of water had hit my empty stomach hard. I had to reign in my gag reflex, though, because an hour from now, I was going to need to be singing. 

It’s not what it looks like. The singing gig was at an assisted living facility. Not all of my scant number of gigs were at assisted living facilities—some of them were at skilled nursing or independent living—but this one very much was, and I was very much about to be hungover and late. 

So on went my 1940s-style dress, on went the little white gloves, into every corner of my sticky, beer-flavored mouth went my toothbrush, and out the door I went, cramming a banana into my mouth as I did. Not in that sexy way, sickos, but, you know—hangover-fighting potassium and all. It worked well enough to clear my mind a bit for the drive across town; just in time to think about the seed of last-night’s ice beer pounding escapades. 

My ex-boyfriend, Shawn, had called me up. 

“Listen,” he’d said, after we’d awkwardly exchanged pleasantries—we’d never had a thing in common but sex and chemistry. “That car. I’m going to need it back, I think.”

That car that he was talking about was—well, technically, my car. When we’d first started going out, I was taking the bus and had no singing gigs, and Shawn, who was good with cars, had gone and given me one he’d fixed up. Wow! We were in the honeymoon phase and it seemed like a good idea to accept that gift. Now the honeymoon phase—and the whole relationship—was dead and buried. 

But I still needed my damn car. 

“Are you sure?” I asked Shawn, afraid to argue much. “I kind of need it.”

There’d been a pause. 

“Ag, yeah, but you were fine without it before,” he said. 

I’d started inwardly panicking. 

“I really need it, though,” I’d said, my voice going high-pitched unintentionally. “I mean, sure, but—I’m singing now, at places. I couldn’t do that without the car.” 

“At nursing homes?” he’d said, voice very disbelieving. “I think you’ll be fine, Ag.”

“Agnes,” I said. 

“Huh?” he asked. 

“Agnes,” I said. “I don’t go by anything else?” 

Oh, fuck. Question-talking. I’d meant for that to be a statement. 

“Wha—you hate Agnes,” Shawn said. His voice was growing more and more exasperated. He’d hang up soonish. “You said it’s a shitty old-lady name.” 

I was confident I’d said no such thing to him, ever, but now was not the time for arguments. Not when there was a lingering possibility he could take my car away right that second. 

“OK,” I said. OK was my happy word; my safe word. I found it tended to calm others down when they got mad at me. “OK, maybe. Yes. Listen, can I keep it until end of the week? I just need to find a new car.”

“Well, it takes more than a week to find a new car,” said Shawn. 

Something in his tone suggested that he was done with the conversation. So I had to agree. 

“Right,” I said. “I guess I’ll find one fast.” 

I hung up instead of him, which initially felt brave. Then, though, I felt intense panic, bought a six-pack, and drank. 

All had been well and good while I was drinking, too. Ever been in a really, really good place—away from all the stressful things in your life, safely sitting at home with the shades drawn—and thought, OK, I’m a pretty great person? Maybe your good place isn’t my good place, but you get the idea; when no one’s there trying to fight you on it, you can decide whatever you’d like about yourself. Good or bad, unremarkable or special. It was why I usually tended to sing while alone. Not a whole lot of pissy critics hanging out in my shower with me. 

But I was moving upward in life, and that was meant to be a good thing. Singing to a crowd of elders who often slept and rarely remembered my name hadn’t been my number one daydream growing up, but it was nice at times and when the old folks felt less lousy, so did I. 

It was just that sometimes in life, shit likes to hit the fan. And it happened that on that particular Thursday signing gig—it really was special, I wasn’t fucking with you—shit and fan both started rapidly barreling toward each other in front of me. The actual collision didn’t happen until later that night, but when it happened, my God did it happen hard. 

Let’s start with the shitty first hint of what was to come, shall we? And I’ll tell you what; it was truly shitty. 

It came near the end of my show. I was performing in the facility dining room in front of a host of elderly folks with various levels of dementia, many of whom were struck at random moments with an unbeatable urge to wander. This was par for the course with these shows, and for the most part, the staff either let them do their thing or, if they looked about to topple over, steered them back to their seat. Sometimes, though, the old folks really needed to get at me. Occasionally this was an old dude who thought I was a literal pinup girl from the 1940s—flattering, since I’m not exactly modelling lingerie anytime soon—but that particular Thursday, it was Mary Lou. 

I’d been at this facility, singing, before, and I recognized and liked her. Mary Lou was a mostly cheerful former nurse who’d lost most of her verbal capabilities, but none of her sense of humor. So she tended to yell out a lot of what sounded like great jokes to me, none of which I could understand. I usually laughed anyway, though.   
That day, she rose from her seat while I was midway into singing my last song and mentally crossing fingers that I’d make it through the next few minutes without toppling over in a sweaty, vomitous heap.   
“  
If I never have a cent,” I sang, “I’ll be rich as Rockefeller—“ I watched her as she wound her way around the table toward me, smiling and waving. A few nearby residents grumbled at the interruption. 

She waved at me. 

“Honey. Honey,” she said, gesturing for me to get closer to her. 

“Gold dust at my feet,” I sang, taking a few steps toward her. 

“On the sunny side of the street,” she finished with me. Her voice was very pretty. 

The assembled elderly residents applauded. Mary Lou gestured again for me, pointing at my hand. I held it out, very antsy. Once, at a different nursing home, an old lady had gotten me to do exactly the same thing and had placed what I can only describe as a giant ball of poop into the palm of my hand. 

But Mary Lou didn’t smell of anything, so I was OK. Instead of offering me a piece of shit, she gently patted my palm. 

“Honey,” she said. “I like the green thing on your hand.” 

I looked. My head spun horrifically as I moved it, and I gulped back the taste of last night’s beer. Oh, Lord. It’d been bad enough when I was drinking it, but the morning after it was like a combination of motor oil, vomit, and reconstituted llama shit. 

“Oh, yes,” I said, swallowing and realizing I had a limited time window to get out of the facility before barfing. “I see that. Nice.”   
Mary Lou looked up at me, and gave what I was pretty sure was the same motherly smile she’d given her kids back in the day. 

“Honey,” she said. “You know, you know, you know—“ she shook her head, and said a few more jumbled things that weren’t quite English. I was pretty sure, though, that the gist of these words were “you know you’re full of bullshit, and don’t actually see the green thing on your hand”. 

“Mary!” called Laura, the facility’s activity director, striding rapidly toward us and reaching out to the old lady. “Come with me, mama. What’s wrong?”   
Mary Lou noticed her, grabbed onto her outstretched hand to humor her, and continued to look at me with a big old smile on her face. 

“Oh,” she said to me, and I was, for a moment, distracted from the roiling of my stomach, because her voice was clear as day and didn’t sound quite like hers. “You’re Agnes Williams? Really? You’re going to be a terrible Herald of Andraste.”

Holy fucking shit. She said those glorious, prophetic words, looked me head-on, and I almost had every bodily function on the planet at once out of sheer terror. Because those were not her words, and I half-hoped, when she spoke them, that I’d lost my shit once and for all, or that somehow I’d passed out without knowing it or drifted into hungover dreamland. I did feel like I had a chunk of my brain missing. 

But Laura was giving her a weird look, too, and then she exchanged looks with me and I decided that what I really needed to do, right then and there, was bolt.   
“You know what I just realized?” I said to Laura, while Mary Lou continued to give me that look of motherly condescension, shaking her head at what a terrible Herald of Whoeverthefuck I was about to be. 

Mary Lou laughed at me. 

“What—oh, you don’t look good,” said Laura.

“I’m late for something,” I concluded. My throat was turning slimy and there was a lump in my esophagus. My eyeballs, moving of their own accord, swiveled their way in the direction of my hand. I could have sworn I saw green there, but it disappeared again before I could give it a second thought. 

I packed up my sound equipment in a rush, fled the building, and locked myself in my car, unable to explain to myself why Mary Lou’s words had felt like such horror-movie scene come to life. I puked quickly into my car’s cup holder, and drove. 

(-)

I hadn’t been shitting Laura when I said I was late for something. Because the high life of singing on the nursing home circuit wasn’t much of a high life, I did, of course, have another, unrelated job. This I’d had for a few years, now, and had had ideas since I’d started out of ditching it eventually once I because a celebrated musical success. This had gotten farther and farther from happening the longer time went by, but on the plus side, I’d managed to go a remarkable amount of time without losing the job. There’d been a series of second jobs to go along with it, but none of them had lasted long. This one was so depressing that I was confident it would outlast time itself.  
It was at a convenience store known as Rick and Billy’s—woo wee—and it paid exactly enough to keep me alive, eating, drinking, and safely indoors. A large number of college students lost their marbles when I ID’d them, and once a woman had wandered in barefoot, explaining that her six-foot-four, two hundred pound husband was high on bath salts and that if he came in here, we should call her and let her know. Every once in a while—not often, but enough to keep me from getting too comfortable—I looked at my uniform and burst into uncontrollable tears. I figured if I kept feeling that awful about it, eventually I’d work up the courage to move up in the world. 

Eventually, though. Somehow it hadn’t happened yet. 

On this particular Thursday, I had a shift starting at two, and, since the home I’d sung at was on the opposite side of my not-quite-town, not-quite city, starting the drive at 1:55 was maybe courting disaster. I was five minutes late and still in my 40s pinup garb when I parked outside. Regretful that I didn’t really have time to clean out my puked-in cupholder, I rushed through the small parking lot and into the store. 

And because it was that sort of a day, my goddamn boss, Ted, was there lurking. 

OK, the first thing I’ll say about Ted: you know exactly what Ted looks like. Seriously, picture a guy—someone’s boss—named Ted.   
If you are or know someone with this name, you’re excused from the exercise, but you didn’t picture an unbelievably average, balding, middle-aged man, did you? That was Ted. 

Ted was a tall, shapeless individual who either wore the same dusty-black pants and short-sleeved button-up every day or owned a closet stocked with nothing but those exact pieces. Ted had a mustache and a droning voice, and all this external stuff might just fool unknowing potential employees into thinking that he was zombie-like stupid, but how wrong they’d be. Ted, you see, was a masterful motherfucker. He was filled to the brim with clever ideas as to how to screw others. 

And he delivered all these ideas to you in a monotone. 

That day, as I stepped inside from the biting wind, adjusting my whipped-around garments, he greeted me immediately. 

“Whoa,” he said. “That’s some uniform you’ve got on, Agnes. Ha ha.” 

I looked up, stomach immediately knotting at the monotonous voice. He was standing behind the counter, stacking plastic-wrapped muffins into a basket, eyes boring straight into me. Not in a sexual way, though, that was one of Ted’s almost-nonexistent virtues. He was an asshole, but he wasn’t a creeper. One of my co-workers had a theory that he reproduced through spores. 

“Oh,” I said, holding up the shopping bag containing my actual uniform. “I brought it. I did.”   
Ted blinked at the bag. 

“Well, but you’re not wearing it though,” he said. 

“I will—“ I started, and he steamrolled me. 

“No uniform. Late,” he gestured to the muffin basket. “That’s why I’m here, stacking muffins. We can’t have you late. We can’t have you without a uniform.” 

“Gotcha,” I said, the back of my neck heating up in embarrassment. I skirted away toward the bathroom. 

“Oh, boy. Skipping along to work still in our church clothes. It just doesn’t work,” Ted’s voice followed me, going from normal-monotone to almost-sad monotone. My stomach, recovered from its latest puke, was hinting that it was up for a second, and I quickly shut the bathroom door behind me. 

“They’re not my church clothes,” I told Ted, from behind the door and quiet enough that he couldn’t possibly hear me. I got undressed and then sat on the toilet for a moment in my underwear, tearing up. I let myself cry for a moment, then shut up. I was too dehydrated to cry, anyway. I needed to get dressed, get behind the counter, and get rid of Ted so that I could steal a bottle of Gatorade. 

I pulled my uniform pants on, and as I did, noticed something on my hand that made me jump, fresh beery sweat breaking out on my back.   
A flash of green. And as I saw it—the moment I saw it—a sharp, cramping feeling gripped my palm, making me flinch and yelp. 

I bit my lip, staring at the bathroom door with my heart racing and afraid to look again. I wasn’t going to, but another, worse pain jolted me out of my hesitance and got me looking squarely at it.

A patch of green. Stupid, bright, alien green, glowing like a TV screen but scabbed around the edges. I shrieked again, twitched, and slapped and rubbed my hand furiously against the toilet paper dispenser, trying frantically to get it off of me. 

“I like the green thing on your hand, honey,” I heard Mary Lou’s voice in my head saying cheerily. 

I whapped my hand against the wall. Then, breathing heavy, I looked slowly down at it. 

Gone now. Only sweaty skin there. 

I sat for a few more moments, and then there was a monstrous pounding on the bathroom door. 

Ted. Oh, sweet Jesus. 

“Tick tick, ha ha,” said Ted. Goddamnit. I was pretty sure there was a certain boring circle of hell for people who overused “haha” and “lol” when texting that consisted entirely of being trapped in a room with Ted for eternity while he went “Ha…ha…ha…ha…” and never stopped. 

For the moment I was annoyed out of my terror, and I put on my uniform. I left the bathroom and took my place behind the counter. My head was swimming, no longer entirely from the hangover. It mostly swam because what the hell would yours do if an old, disoriented lady prophesized correctly about seeing green bullshit on your hand?

“You know, Agnes,” said Ted, “I was supposed to go home an hour ago!” 

I looked at him, and plastered over his face was what passed, in Ted’s existence, for a friendly smile. 

“OK,” I said, not sure what he wanted as a response. “You’re still here, though. Good.”

Ted sighed, but continued to smile. “Nah. I don’t mind doing it. I like feeling like I’ve finished everything I need to finish. Do you know that feeling?” 

It was a test. There was a small scantron sheet appearing in Ted’s brain, I was sure of it. 

“Yes?” I asked. 

Ted’s smile disappeared. A giant red x appeared over his mental scantron, probably.

“Well, see, that’s the thing, Agnes. I guess you don’t really know the feeling that well, because often you don’t complete tasks.” 

That was true. Last night I'd fallen asleep before I completed getting into pajamas, but if Ted had ways of detecting that he was scarier than I'd originally thought.

I nodded at Ted, and said something like a “yeah” in response to his first statement. 

“Also,” said Ted. “I guess I wonder about you being a team player. Well, yeah, I do wonder. With the shift-covering.” 

“Huh?” I asked, caught off-guard because I’d had no idea that out of all of my issues, one of them had to do with covering people’s shifts. 

“You don’t do it!” said Ted, sounding smiley again. 

“I say yes every time,” I said. I was genuinely confounded. 

“Well, but you don’t, though,” said Ted. 

“No,” I said. “Really. I do. Just last week—“ 

I was about to say, just last week I covered two people’s shifts, but Ted then did something that dragged my attention right straight away from our argument. He lost all interest in berating me about work. 

Ted’s a fucking tank when it comes to berating; not a thing in the world can stop him, and yet here he was smacking a hand to the countertop, tilting his head to one side and gaining an expression that was unlike anything I’d ever seen on Ted’s face before. First of all, I was pretty sure I’d never seen an expression on Ted’s face before, but also, his eyes bugged, his lips curled back, and he pointed at something. 

“Holy—“ he said. “That’s not good, there. Ohhhh, that’s not good, there.” 

He grabbed me and I staggered backward with him, looking in the horrifying something’s direction. I saw it, and immediately screamed, writhed out of Ted’s grip, and fled for dear life. I did something I didn’t know anyone outside of action movies could do and leapt over the countertop. 

There was what looked like a green thundercloud brewing across the store from us, by the coolers. There was a deep opening in it that made a vast, rushing, thrumming sound like the biggest industrial-sized fan you ever saw. I wasn’t sticking around to figure out why it did that. I ran for the door, Ted close behind me. 

I heard what sounded like distant booming voices and felt the sound in my chest. I scrabbled for the door handle, seeing for a moment nothing outside the windows but bizarrely sunny day, my car in the parking lot, and a lady walking her kids down the sidewalk. The green cloud and the voices roared louder. I thought I heard Ted’s voice, thin and tinny now, yell something at me. Then a hand yanked on my wrist. 

I kicked and I screamed, and then I turned around and I saw Ted, on his belly on the tile floor. At first I thought he was trying to drag me, but then I saw his lower half begin to float upright and I realized that he was attempting to anchor himself to something. 

Problem was, I wasn’t much of an anchor. I was being dragged backward too. 

My stomach plummeted like a disconnected elevator. The pull on my body was magnetic and unbearable. I could feel the skin rippling off of my skull. 

“Fuck,” I yelled. Ted seemed to be yelling something similar. Our voices were ripped right out of our mouths, lost in the otherworldly green tornado. So I did everything I could think to do to stay alive. I’m not saying they were the right actions, but I fought hard—I swam my arms forward frantically and kicked both legs, forgetting Ted. I kept screaming, although eventually the dusty, off-smelling air made me choke. I thrust my body forward with all my might but it did no good.

I got sucked right into that damn vortex. 

The next thing I was aware of was being dragged through what felt like a rocky birth canal, squeezed, scraping, past something hard and rough on all sides. It was hot where I was, and acid green. I tried to breathe in and my lungs burned when I failed to.

My eyes began to close on me. I felt myself passing out for a brief second. 

(-)

Except it wasn’t actually a second. 

It turns out your judgement turns all to shit when you’re being birthed by a giant green vortex, and with the pain and the heat and the lack of oxygen, I misjudged the amount of time I had my eyes closed. 

I knew this because next I opened my eyes, I was in a very different place. It was, actually, such a different place that my first thought was that I’d had a hell of a dream and was just now waking up. It certainly didn’t seem as though Rick and Billy’s or massive green things had figured into any part of it, because I was now slumped against a tree, outdoors, with three individuals looming large over me. 

One was a skinny, bald man who looked oddly like a pointy-eared, green-clad version of my brother-in-law. The second was a shorter guy with chest hair who was carrying a crossbow, because that was a perfectly normal thing that people carried around with them.

The third was Ted. And there were, at that moment, many things I could have focused on; why I was in a green field where once I'd been in a convenience store, why there was currently blood dripping out of my hair and various sharp pains all over my body, why Ted was wearing armor, a big green hood and a pointy helmet, why-- it didn't really matter, any of it. 

All I knew: I was in the wrong place, and so was Ted. 

"Fuck you, Ted," I screamed.


End file.
